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Marketing 101: The Starting Point

Ready to do some marketing for your new business but not sure where to start? Don’t worry. You can start right where big, successful businesses start. With your unique value proposition (UVP). Also referred to as a USP or unique selling proposition, the UVP is the “one thing” that makes you different from the competition.

Sometimes your product idea is so new that you don’t even have any competition. Think back to before Facebook was Facebook. There were no social media sites where you could reconnect with friends, past and present. But Facebook was “competing” with substitutes. Substituteis a term identified by Porter as one of the five market forces. It is a product or aspect of life that offers similar benefits to your new product. In other words, early Facebook competed with other elements people used for connecting with friends, rendering things like email, phone, and events its substitutes.

To develop your own UVP, try to boil down your offering to a short enough sound bite that you can tell it to anyone in 30 seconds or less. We often refer to this as your elevator pitch. Try Buzzuka, a free tool we developed that helps you boil your story down to a 30-second elevator pitch and then you can even boil your pitch down further to a 10 second tag line. That’s a great place to start figuring out what makes your company or product unique in the marketplace.